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Month: November 2005

All of this trouble and in the end it all fizzled out into nothing. On Tuesday afternoon Wallait Khan announced that after “thorough considerations” he would not be standing for the office as second deputy chairman of the Copenhagen City Council.

No mention is made of the people who helped Khan reconsider his position but what is known is that besides the Social Democratic councillor Sikandar Siddique – or rather Siddique Sr. who intervened on behalf of his son – the Social Liberal group in the new City Council has been less than enthusiastic about Khan.

Note: The headline may not be immediately obvious to non-Danish readers. Copenhagen is definitely not the gourmet capital of Europe but the Copenhagen Town Hall is famed – at least among Danes – for its crêpes or pancakes that are served at official receptions. The recipe is as secret as that of Coca Cola.

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Immigration is a relatively recent phenomenon in Denmark and as a consequence the number of politicians with an immigrant background is still relatively low. The reason is partly to be found in apathy and alienation but the fact that immigrant communities and Danish political organisations have only really begun to integrate during the last 10 years is another important explanation.

This integration is by no means an easy or quick process. However immigrants have started to make their way into the local and national arena. After the 2005 local elections 4 out of 17 councillors in Ishøj just south of Copenhagen – which has a large immigrant population – have an immigrant backgound while the proportion in Århus is 6 out of 31 and in Copenhagen 7 out of 55. (I’m not quite sure if Heidi Wang who is ethnically Chinese should be counted as an immigrant – in that case the number is 8 out of 55).

Even though the Turks (and Kurds who are often mistaken for Turks in Denmark) form the largest immigrant community in Denmark, it is the Pakistanis who have most often hit the headlines. The case of Wallait Khan may illustrate some of the problems Pakistanis have in adjusting to the Danish society – and Danes in understanding immigrant communities.

The “Khan Affair”
What we might call the Khan Affair started shortly after the election when Wallait Khan – who had been elected on the Liberal Party’s list – defected from his party to join the new majority coalition of Social Democrats, Social Liberals, Socialists and the Unity List. Khan’s move meant that the three centre-right parties would only get one of seven mayoral portfolios in stead of two while Khan would be made second deputy chairman of the City Council. This is not a full time post nor even a politically important post but it is relatively well paid and definitely a spoil that parties would be interested in.

The affair really started to take off because Khan has a complicated history both within the Pakistani community and the Danish political system.

The Danish Connection
Khan started his political career in the local Immigrant List, which ran candidates for the local elections in Copenhagen back in the late 1980s, before switching to the Socialist Party.

In 2000 he then made a high profile switch to the Liberal Party: The Liberals welcomed him as a symbol of entrepreneurship and he was also a useful profile in a situation where immigration and integration policies were becoming hotly debated subjects in Danish politics. The Liberals could use Khan and other immigrants as proof that the party wasn’t intolerant and that the left-wing didn’t have a monopoly on the immigrant vote.

The Socialists were less happy: It surfaced that Khan had succeeded in building a debt to the party, which according to the party statutes would have prevented him from standing on the party’s ticket for the 2001 local elections.

In this light Khan’s defection looked more like opportunism than an ideologically motivated move.

Why Khan chose to defect back to the left-wing is less clear. The Liberal party hasn’t – yet – planted any stories that could undermine his credibility in the media, but what is clear is that his price for joining the left-wing coalition was the office as second deputy chairman of the City Council.

Even though many Socialists were happy to leave the centre-right with only one mayoral portfolio, they were less than happy about supporting Khan. Several members of the Socialist, Social Democratic and Social Liberal Parties as well as the Unity List have voiced their concern and the cohesion of the coalition is far from certain.

Defect once and you lose political credibility. Defect twice and you lose all of it.

The Pakistani Connection
Be that as it may, but things only really started to get ugly when Khan’s Pakistani connections were brought to public attention.

First, Khan was accused of litterally speaking with two tongues by allegedly supporting the islamist movements Hisb-ut-Tahir and Minhaj-ul-Quran (my excuses if the spelling is not correct) in Urdu publications while supporting – or at least not distancing himself from – the Liberal party line on those movements. In the end, Khan declared on Monday evening that he did not support islamist attacts on the Danish political system.

Second, it was revealed that Khan – who is a Pakistani citizen – not only had been absent from many plenary and committee meetings in the City Council during the last term but that he had also spent much time in Pakistan trying to get elected to a local office there.

Thirdly, conflicts within the Pakistani community in Denmark were brought to the light as former associates and activits of the Pakistani Association accused Khan of – to put it mildly – economic mismanagement. To round things off, newspaper reports linked Khan to violent confrontations and other types of conflicts more often associated with the activities of criminal gangs than of politicians in Denmark.

Finally, a comic climax was reached this Monday when Social Democratic councillor Sikandar Malik Siddique – or rather Siddique’s father who belongs to a different faction than Khan in the Pakistani community – declared that he would not support an agreement that would make Khan second deputy chairman of the City Council.

That move may have damaged Khan, but it didn’t do much to help young Siddique’s chances in Danish politics.

A Clash of Cultures or a Comic Interlude?
Even if Danish local politics has had its share of strange characters – the inimitable Louise Frevert and the disgraced ex-mayor of Farum Peter Brixtofte may serve as a recent cases in point – Khan’s behaviour and the conflicts surrounding him must surely seem bizarre to a Danish public.

On the other hand parts of Khan’s behaviour make sense if we see him as a traditional aspiring clan-leader acting to position himself within his community and trying to excercise patronage. In this case ideologies and political organisations are merely instruments used to achieve other goals. Whether or not this sort of behaviour is compatible with a political system that has evolved over more than a century and where ideological and social rather than clan-based cleavages are important remains to be seen.

It should also be noted that even though family and clan ties allegedly are important in immigrant politics, then the kind of outrageous behaviour that we have seen from Khan during the last two weeks is the exception rather than the rule among politicians with an immigrant background.

It may well be that Khan will regret seeking a high-profile political office: The deputy chairman Hellen Hedeman is said to have voiced her concern about Khan’s ability to fullfill the duties of a chairman or deputy chairman.

To play truant from the Taxi Licence Board’s meetings may be one thing, to go AWOL from a City Hall reception – any City Hall reception – will be a public relations disaster, especially now that the national media have set their eyes on him.

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The National Level I – General
The political effects of the local elections on the national level seem to have been minimal. The Liberal Party has played down its inability to achieve the goal of becoming the party with the most mayors by blaming lock of cohesion in the centre-right camp, while the Social Democrats as of now haven’t been able to capitalise on the gains in the local elections in general and mayoral offices in particular.

One reason is that the national agenda in the media has been occupied by the publication of what can only be described as an avalanche of books on the internal conflict within the Social Democratic party during the 1990s and 2000s.

The former SD leader and PM Poul Nyrup Rasmussen published the second volume of his autobiography which included some harsh attacs on his predecessor as SD leader Svend Auken while one of Auken’s supporters, Jacob Buksti, published his account of the conflict giving a negative view of Nyrup and a journalist published a collective biography of Nyrup, Auken, Mogens Lykketoft and Ritt Bjerregaard.

Thus attention was drawn to the old fault lines within the party rather than a discussion of its present or future role in national politics.

It made little difference that a former Ekstra Bladet-journalist published a less-than-cordial portrait of former Conservative party leader and present editor of the said tabloid, Hans Engell. Despite, or perhaps because of, the internal conflicts in the Conservative Party during the mid and late 1990s where Engell directly or indirectly played an important role, no-one in the party wanted to open old wounds.

Whether or not the participation and eventual victory of the polical spokesman of the Liberal Party, Jens Rohde, in an entertainment contest on DR TV distracted attention may be a topic for further discussion. One of the other competitors in the show was the former Social Democratic minister Frank Jensen who after loosing the party vote to become party chairman in the spring is looking for a new career outside of politics.

The National Level II – Reactions to the Defections
Even if the relative number of defections do not seem to be higher than usual, they received an unusual degree of political attention on the national level. The Danish People’s Party suggested that newly elected councillors should not be allowed to leave their parties before the formal election of mayors, while a representative of the Liberal Party wanted to take away the right of non-Danish citizens to vote in local elections.

Both proposals were rejected immediately by the government.

The National Level III – Danish Peoples’ Party and Louise Frevert
The leading candidate for the Danish Peoples’ Party, Louise Frevert, attracted a lot of negative publicity during the campaign and after the election and she may be considered the #1 victim of the campaign.

In late September it was discovered that her personal homepage contained a number of articles which according to lawyers might be considered racist. After initially defending the articles publicly, Frevert finally declared that her webmaster had posted the texts without her knowledge.

Despite this retreat, the Social Liberal leader in Copenhagen declared that he under no circumstances would enter an agreement which also included the DPP and this in the end meant that the Liberal Søren Pind had no chance of becoming First Mayor of Copenhagen.

Frevert was forced to take a “time-out” from her post as an MP where she was the party’s spokesman on education and culture and on her return earlier this week, she was stripped of the position as education spokesman. (“Time-outs” have become a national pastime in Swedish politics since the Mona Sahlin affair back in 1996, but have been unknown in Denmark up untill now).

Finally Frevert was the victim of sexual harassment during the final days of the campaign as unknown activists placed posters in the streets in parts of Copenhagen with pictures of her dating from the 1970s and allegedly showing her in what can best be described as explicit contexts. The posters are under police investigation but no suspects have been named.

The question which is still being considered is to what degree Frevert’s behaviour and misfortunes can explain the relatively meagre result of the local elections for the DPP on the electoral arena and to what degree she has been made the scapegoat for the party’s performance.

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The Final Agreements
Most agreements on the future distribution of offices were made during the evening of November 15 or the following day. Hence the last week has been relatively undramatic in most of the communes and regions.

There are some notable exceptions, however. The political unrest continued in the City of Copenhagen with a spectacular defection from the Liberal Party that led to national reactions. The distribution of offices in the Metropolitan Region hasn’t been settled yet, two mayors in Ringsted and Greve unexpectedly lost office and there has been demonstrations in protest against the ney mayors in Ikast-Brande, Hjørring and Greve.

As of Saturday the distribution of offices in the communes are: SD 45, Liberals 36, Conservatives 11, Social Liberals 1, Socialists 1 and local parties 4 (secondary offices in Copenhagen, Århus, Ålborg and Odense are not included). This makes the Social Democrats the largest party both in terms of share of the vote and mayoral posts.

Copenhagen
The distribution of offices in the City of Copenhagen took some unexpected turns in the days following the election. On election night Ritt Bjerregaard secured a deal with the Social Liberal Party that gave her the post of First Mayor and the two parties four of seven mayoral posts.

In a surprising second round of negotiations the Socialist Peoples’ Party and Unity List were included in the deal and finally the Liberal Wallait Khan defected from his group to the SPP group which meant that the centre-left could take control of six of seven mayoral posts – leaving only one low-profile post to the Liberal Party – and a number of other offices and spoils.

Khan’s defection led to some fall-out on the local and national level.

One reason was that this was the second time that Khan changed his affiliation following an election. Some years ago, he defected from the Socialist Peoples’ Party to the Liberal Party, but now chose to defect in the opposite direction.

Khan was also criticised for not attending plenary and committee meetings during the last term and it was revealed that he had been in Pakistan during much of the autumn in an attempt to win office in Pakistani local government. Khan was rewarded with the post of 2nd deputy chairman of the Copenhagen Local Council but may loose his mandate if the electoral committee following a formal complaint against Khan (filed by the Liberal Party!) decides that he is not eligible at local elections due to his long sejours in his home country.

Finally news media have started focusing on questionable aspects of Khan’s activities in the Pakistani immigrant community. Whether or not the reported stories – which include allegations of fraud and violence and which are highly unusual in a Danish context – are true or part of an orchestrated campaign against Khan remains to be seen.

The Metopolitan Region
The parties in the new Metropolitan Regional Council have not been able to reach an agreement on the distribution of offices. The Social Liberal Kirsten Lee (Frederiksborg county) objected to the election of former county mayor Vibeke Storm Rasmussen (SD, Copenhagen county) or Lars Engberg (SD, City of Copenhagen) as chairman of the regional council but wasn’t able to gather an own majority. Lee’s argument was that both Storm Rasmussen and Engberg have led failed hospital systems.

After a week the Social Democrats, the Socialist Peoples’ Party and the Danish Peoples’ Party made an agreement that will make Storm Rasmussen chairman and Henrik Thorup (DPP) deputy chariman of the regional council. The three parties do not have a majority, however, as neither the Social Liberal Party nor the Unity List wanted to join the agreement for different reasons. The UL will probably vote for Storm Rasmussen but against Thorup.

It may be noted that Kirsten Lee is the wife of former SLP leader and foreign minister Niels Helveg Petersen while Henrik Thorup is the husband of DPP leader Pia Kjærsgaard.

Other Defections and Protests
Another spectacular defection took place in Greve – a suburb of Copenhagen – where controversial Liberal mayor René Milo seemed to have achieved reelection but was defeated by the Conservative Hans Barlach after Birgitte Klarskov Jerkel defected from the Liberal to the Conservative Party.

Jerkel’s motivation for her defection was that René Milo would not assign her to any political posts despite her gaining the second largest number of personal votes in the local election. According to Jerkel, Milo’s reaction was that she “had only received her votes because she was a woman and looked good”.

Jerkel’s defection was met with angry reactions by the local branch of the Liberal party culminating in the publication of an anonymous hate-site on the internet (which the local Liberal Party did not detach itself from) and a nightly demonstration which was originally scheduled to end at Jerkel’s private home.

The demonstration was in the end re-routed to Greve Town Hall after a national outcry.

What is worth noticing is that this demonstration was not unique: In both the new Ikast-Brande and Hjørring communes the loosing side organised demonstrations in protest against the future mayors. This kind of demonstrations seems to be a new phenomenon in Danish local politics.

National trends
The turnout stayed on the level from 1997, which is slightly surprising given the lack-lustre campaign and uncertainties about the new administrative bodies. Turnout was reported as 69,4% against 70,1% in 1997 and 85% in 2001. The unusually high turnout in 2001 was due to the fact that local, regional and national elections were held on the same day.

The results on a national level have not been announced yet, but the Social Democrats may have won some votes compared to 2001 while Venstre also increased its share of the vote. On the other hand the Social Democrats can still claim to be Denmarkï¿½s largest party in local government. The movements for most of the other parties seem to be neglible on a national level.

Some interesting resultsCopenhagen
The Social Democrats under Ritt Bjerregaard won a convincing victory with nearly 38% of the votes cast. This is a massive increase in the partyï¿½s share of the vote. The Social Liberal Party also increased its share even though their gains were smaller than expected.

On the other hand the Liberal Party under Sï¿½ren Pind lost votes and Pind announced that he would retire from local politics.

In a surprising move, Bjerregaard is expected to make an agreement on mayoral posts with the Social Liberal Party while not including the Socialist Party and the Socialist Unitary List.

ï¿½rhus
Even though the Liberals under Louise Gade recorded gains, it was not enough to keep her in office. Nicolai Wammen will be the new mayor supported by the left wing.

Odense
Incumbent Anker Boye suffered massive losses and will be replaced by Jens Boye despite a desperate late-night offer to the Social-Liberal Party where the Social Democrats offered the post of mayor to that party.

Vejle
Vejle is being merged with three minor suburban and rural communes. Here Socialist Flemming Christensen (no relative) who has been mayor since 1993 lost office to an unusual coalition of Social Democrats, Liberals and Danish Peopleï¿½s Party.

Leif Skov (SD) who is the incumbent mayor in the suburban commune of Bï¿½rkop will be the new mayor with Arne Sigtenbjerggaard (Liberal and mayor of Jelling) as Deputy Mayor and Kristian Thulesen Dahl (DPP and an MP and member of Give local council) as 2nd deputy.

Back in 1993 Flemming Christensen became mayor in this otherwise traditionally Social Democratic town by securing the support of Liberals and Conservatives. In 2001 local business magnate Olaf Haahr created his own Citizensï¿½ List to secure Christensenï¿½s re-election.

Horsens
Horsens is another new commune where a town is being merged with a number of smaller rural communes. Here former minister Jan Trï¿½jborg (SD) somewhat surprisingly cruised to victory.

ï¿½benrï¿½
ï¿½benrï¿½ is included for good measure. Here the incumbent mayor of Rï¿½dekro Tove Larsen (SD) won a convincing victory in all parts of the new ï¿½benrï¿½ commune and will command an own majority in the new local council.

Political Effects on the National Level
The effects on the national level are hard to gauge today. The Social Democrats may take some comfort in their relatively good results, which broke a string of blunders on the national level. On the other hand the Liberal Party cannot be said to have suffered significant losses.

Maybe the looser of these elections is the Conservative Party which is still feeling the competition from the Liberal Party in the major cities and which is finding it hard to maintain its share of the vote.

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The campaign has generally been described as unusually dull with very few interesting themes. One reason may be that the financing of the new bodies hasn’t been settled yet so that it has been difficult for the candidates to make clear promises.

The national parties kept a relatively low profile: The Social Democrats declared that their aim was to win the posts as mayor in all four big cities (Copenhagen, Århus, Ålborg and Odense) – alternatively ”three of the four big cities” – while the Liberals declared that their aim was to win ”a plurality” of mayoral posts.

The campaign in Copenhagen attracted some national interest. The Social Democrats in Copenhagen failed to recruit a mayoral candidate from their own ranks and in stead chose to field the 64-year old veteran Ritt Bjerregaard – who first entered national politics in 1971 and has been a minister and a European commissioner – as their candidate for the post of First Mayor and successor of Jens Kramer Mikkelsen who left office in late 2004 and was replaced by interim candidate Lars Engberg.

Two other politicians presented themselves as candidates for the office of First Mayor: Søren Pind (Venstre/Liberal) who had been Housing and Infrastructure Mayor since 1997 and was generally seen as belonging to the hard-line faction of his party. Pind’s relationship with the leadership of his party is notoriously bad with a dirty campaign between Pind and his ally Martin Geertsen on the one hand and the party leadership and Jens Rohde on the other about a safe parliamentary seat in the run-up to the 2005 national elections as the high – or low – point.

Pind ran a hard-line campaign focusing on law-and-order (in itself not an issue for local government) and integration policy where he announced tough measures against young immigrants who committed crimes. The campaign turned out to be a complete failure both in terms of choice of issue and stance.

The other main candidate was Klaus Bondam (Radikale Venstre/Social Liberal) who is best known as an actor (He played the role of the toastmaster in Thomas Vinterberg’s 1997 dogma movie “Festen” and in the last episode of the popular crime series Rejseholdet/Mordkommissionen a Justice Minister who might have murdered an African prostitute) and a successful theatre manager. He also succeeded in easing out long-time party faithful Inger Marie Bruun Vierø as the party’s local political leader. Bondam is also one of the few openly gay politicians in Denmark.

Finally the main candidate of the Danish People’s Party, Louise Frevert, caused a scandal when articles posted on her homepage were criticised for being racist. Frevert managed to survive this by blaming her webmaster for the postings.

The campaign in Århus attracted some interest as incumbent Louise Gade (Liberal) who broke 82 years of Social Democrat rule tried to win re-election as mayor against the new Social Democratic candidate Nicolai Wammen.

In Odense incumbent Anker Boye (Social Democrat) had problems with a number of minor scandals – mostly related to the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the writer H.C. Andersen – and was challenged in the local elections by the outgoing Conservative county mayor Jens Boye. (The two Boyes are not related).

In both Århus and Odense, it was prognosed that the Social Liberal party would hold the balance and that party’s national leadership had decided to take a demonstratively neutral stance.

The merger of communes meant that the relationship between old towns and countryside and suburban communes attracted some attention. As it turned out the mergers did hold some surprises for established politicians in many communes.

Comic relief was provided by the campaign in Rudersdal, which is a merger of Søllerød and Birkerød communes – both among the most affluent suburbs of Copenhagen – when the Conservative Party decided to choose industrialist and socialite Christian Kjær as the party’s front candidate. The led the Conservative mayor of Birkerød to leave his party while the Liberal mayor of Søllerød ridiculed Kjær as a “National Inquirer”-kind of candidate. (Verbatim: “En ugebladskandidat” and “en Se-og-Hør-figur”).

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Neither Franz Müntefering nor Eduard Stoiber earned much praise for their respective moves. Müntefering is criticised for acting in an autocratic fashion (as is Schröder), while Stoiber just looks plain silly back home in Bayern. Prospective successors are sharpening their knives.

Angela Merkel has kept a very low profile – which of cause also means that she hasn’t made any public mistakes.

With regard to policy, only few details have yet emerged from the coalition negotiations. It seems that the VAT rate will be raised from 16 to 18% and that the power of the Bundesrat (and the States) will be limited.

This week’s public debacle – or comic relief, if you like – came in the form of a fourth vote in the Bundestag on the Linkspartei candidate for one of the posts as deputy speaker. The LP had presented the chairman of the PDS Lothar Bisky as their candidate in three previous votes and on each occasion Bisky failed to gain an absolute majority of the votes.

In the fourth vote Bisky could go through with only a relative majority, but he instead lost the vote with an absolute majority. The LP has decided to abstain from filling their post as deputy chairman.

PS: A silly note – The spelling control suggests that I should replace Müntefering with suffering (very apt!), Stoiber with liberator (he’d probably like that) and Merkel with Berkeley (A catholic idealist? Spooky!). The Linkspartei is either “disparateness” or “kindergarten” and finally the spelling control suggests replacing Lothar Bisky with “loathing risky”.

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Things seem to move fast in Germany. Franz Müntefering had barely announced his resignation as party chairman before the two main candidates to succed him, Kurt Beck (PM of Rheinland-Pfalz) and Matthias Platzeck (PM of Brandenburg), announced that Platzeck was their candidate for the post.

Platzeck’s biography is a quite fascinating – especially when you compare it to Angela Merkel’s:

1. He is an East German (so is Merkel)

2. He is born in 1953 (Merkel 1954), which makes him 10 years younger than the “old” guard in the SDP, CDU and CSU.

3. He is the son of a Doctor and the grandson of a vicar (Merkel is the daughter of a vicar)

4. He has a university degree in science (so has Merkel)

5. He is not a “natural” Social Democrat. He first joined Bündnis ’90 when it was an East German civil rights party, but left in 1993 when the party merged formally with the West German Green Party (Merkel started her career in Demokratischer Aufbruch before joining the CDU during 1990 and she is often seen as a Liberal-Conservative rather than a Christian Democrat)

There are of cause some differences as well:

6. Platzeck has his political roots in politics on the state level, Merkel on the Federal level.

7. Platzeck has been the head of a grand coalition (in Brandenburg), Markel hasn’t (yet).

8. Platzeck’s rise within the Brandenburg SPD since 1995 has been relatively uncontroversial. Unlike Merkel he hasn’t overthrown any of the previous leaders on his way up, but was in fact Manfred Stolpe’s chosen successor as chairman of the Brandenburg SPD and PM of Brandenburg.

And finally one really funny thing to note:

9. Platzeck rose to national stardom during the floodings of 1997 when he was Minister for the Environment in Brandenburg. I’ll save you the quiz element and just note that a certain Helmut Schmidt from a place called Hamburg performed the same feat following the floodings of 1963.

What else? According to the media there are some pretty heated discussions within and around the SPD about Monday’s vote. It is interesting to note that the left wing in the party doesn’t get all of the blame.

A comment in Die Zeit (German weekly published by the very Schmidt mentioned above) blames Müntefering and his generation for running the party in an “apres nous, la déluge”-fashion – too much form and posing and too little political content.

On the other hand, Andrea Nahles whose run for the post as General Secretary of the party triggered this week’s events now declare that everything was a terrible misunderstanding and that her run wasn’t intended to weaken the party chairman. Nahles and her supporters are of cause criticised for being too naïve about party politics.

Wednesday’s collateral damage was Heidemarie Wiczorek-Zeul (my apologies if I have spelled that name wrong…), one of the vice-chairmen of the party and also one of the prominent leftwingers within the SPD. She will not be standing for reelection in two weeks’ time, but Nahles is mentioned as a possible successor.

The government? Well, it seems that a) Franz Müntefering still wants to join the cabinet as Vice-Chancellor and Minister of Labour, b) Michel Glos will replace Edmund Stoiber as Minister of Trade and Commerce (Merkel probably won’t shed too many tears over that change in the line-up), c) SPD and CDU have agreed on increasing the VAT from 16 to 18%. (What? Something related to policy? Well, have you ever!)